Over 4,500 trade shows are held in North America each year. These shows are predominantly business-to-business or B-2-B wherein businesses seek to display and sell their products to other businesses. A number of methods are employed to enable exhibitors to collect leads at these trade shows. The simplest and perhaps oldest method is commonly referred to as the fishbowl wherein attendees are encouraged to drop their business cards into a fishbowl or the like, and the deposited cards are retrieved and processed by the exhibitors or trade show organizers.
More modem methods include the use of a magnetic card stripes and bar code readers. One bar code arrangement is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,654,793 to Elrod, entitled “System and method for registering and keeping track of the activities of attendees at a trade show, convention or the like.” Under a typical method, each attendee is given a badge at his or her arrival at the trade show registration desk. The badge will normally have the attendee's name printed thereon and either a barcode or a magnetic stripe similar to that of a credit card. The magnetic stripe or barcode provides the attendee's basic contact information, which commonly includes his or her name, address, phone, and company or, alternatively, a number that correlates to that information, which is retained in a separate database.
The exhibitors are outfitted with readers, which are normally rented. Depending on the particular method employed, exhibitors must scan the bar code or swipe the magnetic stripe to gain the attendee's basic contact information. The scanner, which is a non-networked, standalone unit, then prints on paper the basic contact information scanned from the card or bar code. The paper is often carbon copied, allowing for two or more simultaneous copies to be made. Some readers have the ability to upload the stored names to a floppy disk in comma delimited ASCII format after the show.
Unfortunately, these prior art systems have not been updated in substance since the advent of two-dimensional bar codes in the early 1990's. As a result, they present several problems and disadvantages. One basic problem that plagues all three existing systems, the fishbowl, the magnetic stripe, and the barcode, is that each requires intrusively asking the attendee for a card or grabbing the attendee's badge. By surveying trade show exhibitors, the present inventors have determined that exhibitors are very uncomfortable asking for stranger's business cards or grabbing someone's magnetic stripe badge or shooting a laser beam at a card hanging on an attendee's chest. This problem becomes exasperated when a male exhibitor needs to scan the badge of a female attendee. The present inventors have appreciated, therefore, that a passive system would be preferred that could record the meeting without requiring the exhibitor to be intrusive and aggressive, particularly upon first meeting an attendee.
A further problem demonstrated by the methods of the prior art is a lack of mobility in that the exhibitor must normally drag attendees across the trade show booth to scan or swipe their badges. Such a practice is counter-intuitive to the typical sales process where a salesperson normally spends time chatting and displaying products before asking for contact information. Also, it requires the salesperson to place a further burden on the customer by asking the customer to follow him or her across the booth for the scanning or swiping.
Some have sought to address this problem by attaching barcode scanners to PDAs so that exhibitors can avoid dragging attendees across the trade show booth. However, doing so creates new problems while failing to eliminate the intrusiveness of shooting a laser beam at an attendee's chest or swiping the attendee's badge. Also, the PDAs in such systems are not networked and do not print out the retrieved information as it is gathered. As a result, there is no backup of the data collected, and, should the PDA lose power or otherwise malfunction, data collected during the day can be lost forever. Indeed, some companies offering this type of service have been forced to terminate it as a result of data loss. Even further, some companies have added bar code scanners and printers to PDAs and PDA-like devices, but these devices have proven to be large and unwieldy such that they have not found widespread acceptance in the trade show world.
A newer method involves connecting a bar code scanner or metallic stripe reader to a PC, whether a laptop or desktop, and savings the data collected directly to the PC. Several PC's may be networked within a booth under such a system. While such systems provide improvements over dedicated systems, they ultimately return only what amounts to a list of names. As a result, they rely on the exhibitor to question the attendee about his or her interests and the like. Further, such systems typically still return information only in comma delimited ASCII text and do not integrate and manipulate the acquired data. As a result, the exhibitor must carry out such tasks on its own or by use of additional consulting services.
Still another problem demonstrated by existing lead retrieval systems is that, after a trade show, the exhibitor is forced to remember people by name. The exhibitor receives a list of names after the show with little other data to help remember which people were key leads and which were not. While some systems allow exhibitors to take notes on the people they met and some allow exhibitors to press a series of buttons to categorize the people they meet, such as with a 1-to-5 rating system, such a practice is still far less than optimal and does not correlate with the way the human brain works. People remember faces better than names, and no lead acquisition system today enables exhibitors after the show to see whom they met.
Finally, while some systems network various lead retrieval devices within a trade show booth, no known system to date networks systems between trade show booths. As a result, exhibitors have no way of knowing how they did in comparison to other exhibitors at the show or compared to the show at large. As a result, exhibitors are left to guess at their relative success at any given show they attend.
By way of further background, one will note that the use of infrared (IR) light to transmit information has been employed for some time in a variety of devices, from remote controls for televisions and stereo appliances to its use in PDAs to exchange business card and other information. Furthermore, experimentation using infrared beacons to designate locations has been employed by the MIT Media Lab and HP Cooltown, both of which have disclosed their experiments publicly including through the Internet.
The MIT Media Lab has also engaged in limited experiments using IR tags to designate people. In those experiments, each person is outfitted with a wearable computer. Each wearable computer detects other wearable computers IR tags and then looks up on a wireless network any information associated with the tag and displays that information relative to an eyepiece. However, there are certain problems that are created using this method, which MIT has left unsolved.
The Media Lab's experiments have been conducted with small groups of people, not with the size and scale of crowds that attend a trade show. In a crowd, IR beacons have the potential to interfere with one another. If, for simplicity's sake, one assumes the IR beacon blinks once per second on the tenth of a second, then more than ten people in a room together will result in at least two people blinking simultaneously and, therefore, in synch. This synchronicity causes confusion for the device trying to read the tags because the computer cannot distinguish between what each tag is broadcasting separately.
Furthermore, MIT has used IR tags on physical objects as a means for identifying them to a wearable computer. HP Cooltown has done the same relative to PDAs. Both of these models, however, are dependent on each person having a wearable computer or PDA for the system to work. A person wearing an IR tag but without a wearable computer or PDA cannot be identified as having been in a particular location under the MIT and HP systems. In this regard, it will be appreciated that the cost of outfitting each attendee at a trade show with a wearable computer or PDA would be prohibitive and, therefore, not an economically viable option.
The MIT Media lab has done other experiments with what they refer to as “Meme Tags” and “GroupWear Tags” GroupWear Tags represent an earlier attempt at creating an intelligent nametag wherein users were asked 5 questions upon registering for a conference. Users would then be given a nametag that contained 5 red and 5 green LEDs and an IR receiver/transmitter. Upon meeting someone at a conference, the tag would communicate with the other person's tag and determine how many questions they answered in common. If, for example, they had 3 questions in common, the tag would light 3 green LEDs and 2 red LEDs.
One will appreciate that the relatively primitive means of predictive scoring provided by GroupWear Tags is limited by the number of lights that could fit on a nametag. Furthermore, it represents only the degree to which two persons have interests in common. It is incapable of determining to what extent each person is interested in meeting the other. For example, if an attendee is interested in meeting an exhibitor for the purposes of securing employment, but the exhibitor is not hiring, the GroupWear tag only gives both a rudimentary indication that they are a bad fit for each other. It does not notify an exhibitor a-priori that this person is someone to be avoided. By publicly and openly saying “no” to the attendee, the GroupWear Tag denies the attendee the opportunity to make his or her case despite the bad rating.
The Meme Tag is a bit more complex and is more suited for conferences than for trade shows. Each Meme Tag is outfitted with an LCD display, which shows a bit of information, commonly referred to as a meme. Upon meeting other attendees, each attendee has the opportunity to press a red button or a green button to accept or decline the other attendee's meme. Periodically, attendees may upload their collected memes at kiosks via an IR port on the Meme Tag. The Meme Tag records which memes the attendee collected from whom and when the meme was collected. The Meme Tag system then creates reports and maps of who met whom at the conference event. Charmed Technologies has a similar product, referred to as the CharmBadge, which also enables collecting the names of people met at conferences. In January of 2003, another company, nTag, emerged with similar technology based on the same research.
It has been found that there are a number of problems with each of the GroupWear Tag, the Meme Tag, and the CharmBadge. For example, each arrangement is what can be termed attendee-centric in that functionality is imparted to the badge that is costly and that does not serve the needs of the group that actually pays for the show, the exhibitors. Further, each of these devices operates in an overt way allowing the other party in a conversation or meeting to see what one is doing by pressing red and green buttons on a tag or by overtly displaying to the other party whether they should be meeting. This can be embarrassing to attendees who have their memes rejected, especially if those memes are business cards, and uncomfortable to the attendee actually doing the rejecting. Additionally, except for the nTag design, which was launched after the filing date of the present application and which appears to be networked wirelessly, none of these systems are networked except when docked or in front of a designated IR kiosk. Therefore, none of these systems can provide real-time information about the status on the show floor.
Even further, the knowledgeable observer will be aware that no known prior art system enables one to recreate a trade show after it is completed or to view what happened overall at a given trade show after it is over. These disadvantages derive from, among other things, the facts that the data collected is largely incomplete and is not collected and analyzed in one central database.
For these and further reasons, it is clear that there is a cognizable need for an improved system and method for retrieving information regarding mobile articles and persons, such as information relative to the characteristics and activities of trade show attendees and exhibitors, and for disseminating content based thereon.